Convert character to Date in R

Question

I am relatively new to R  but this is the first time I have had to deal with date conversions   I read in my data from a CSV  using read table     but I shorted the data to highlight my issue   When read into R  the Date field is character   Simply  most of my dates get coerced correctly  except for a few instances   The example below will hopefully show you what is going on     my attempt to coerce the date -- uses the stringr package prods all Date2  lt - as Date str sub prods all Date  1                   str locate prods all Date       1 -1                      m  d  Y      grab two rows to highlight my issue temp  lt - prods all c 1925 1926   c 1 8     gt  temp                    Date      Date2 1925  10 9 2009 0 00 00 2009-10-09 1926 10 15 2009 0 00 00 0200-10-15   As you can see  the year of some of the dates is inaccurate   The pattern seems to occur when the day is double digit   I have looked through a couple of books and tried to Google a better way  but everything seems to suggest that my data are not formatted correctly on input     Given how powerful R is  I figure that there is a very easy way to force my column to be valid dates and that I am overlooking a very obvious solution     Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated

User · Answer

The easiest way is to use lubridate   library lubridate  prods all Date2  lt - mdy prods all Date2    This function automatically returns objects of class POSIXct and will work with either factors or characters

User · Answer

You may be overcomplicating things  is there any reason you need the stringr package     df  lt - data frame Date   c  10 9 2009 0 00 00    10 15 2009 0 00 00     as Date df Date    m  d  Y  H  M  S      1   2009-10-09   2009-10-15   More generally and if you need the time component as well  use strptime    strptime df Date    m  d  Y  H  M  S     I m guessing at what your actual data might look at from the partial results you give

User · Answer

library lubridate  if your date format is like this  04 24 2017 05 35 00 then change it like below prods all Date2 lt -gsub      -  prods all Date2   then change the date format parse date time prods all Date2  orders  mdy hms

[r] Convert character to Date in R

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